News

News from the lab

11/22/24: Madeline joined the lab !

11/15/24: Dawson joined the lab !

9/1/24: Clare will speak at the Simons Foundation symposium, "Function of Evolving Systems," in New York, NY on December 2.

8/24: Clare taught a Stanford mini-course with Dr. Marianna Karageorgi and Jess Rhodes, "Whole-genome sequencing and applications: from yeast to fruit flies." Materials are available on github.

7/17/24: Clare published a paper with Shaili Mathur and Dr. Dmitri Petrov, "Environmental memory alters the fitness effects of adaptive mutations in fluctuating environments." This paper shows that fluctuating environments generate new and dramatic fitness behaviors due to widespread memory, where growth in one cycle of an environment affects fitness in the following cycle. Moreover, the results reveal a pattern: the greater a mutant’s variation in fitness across static environments, the more memory it exhibits in fluctuating environments. Environment-sensing mutations are a potential genetic mechanism for the memory, and  a mathematical model shows that these mutations may alter pre-growth lag times.